War Breaks Things

I’ve been doing some reading on Second World War combat. It’s been interesting, since almost no one’s fought a war of comparable intensity since, and it’s raised some uncomfortable questions about how the U.S. has structured its military.

If you have an image in your head of The Great War, it’s probably of French countryside turned into a blasted moonscape, with waves of men charging futilely into machine gun fire. We associate WWI with a sort of grinding attrition, a fighting that was more meat grinder than contest of skill. We don’t, by and large, think of the Second World War in that light. We tend to think of tanks and planes and commando raids and huge armies moving across open country in a war of maneuver.

That’s not strictly the case of course. The Second World War could prove to be every bit the grinding war of attrition that…